


fæcce

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Horror, Insomnia, M/M, No Plot/Plotless, True Forms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 16:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4842740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When he met you in Hell, you were the scariest thing he had ever seen.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	fæcce

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wolfize](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wolfize/gifts).



 

This isn't where he wants to be. He's always wished for a way to end nights when they were meant to be over—a flip to switch to escape the pillow talk, the shame, the three-AM drinking; in a lot of ways, Dean hates nighttime. What he hates about this nighttime is the purple fug of that little moon drooping in the sky, illuminating just enough of the room so that he can see all the things that bother him: his nakedness; the irritating swirl of sheets and blankets around his feet; Cas, lying next to him, curled up and stiff and fossilised.

 

Why can't it be morning? Then this can be over. Dean isn't sure if he has any regrets just yet. He supposes that will come after midnight, when the sweat has cooled on his skin and he's begun to feel the pressure of the purple light. Certainly he's wanted this, wanted it for a while, and he knows Cas has, too. Doesn't bother asking, _was it good for you?_ Because, as far as he knows, Cas has no frame of reference. And it seemed good, felt good, the way sex should; it's just this loathing Dean has for lying awake, especially next to a body that's so new to him.

 

He turns his head to the risen ridges of Cas' spine. He likes them very much but isn't sure he should compliment them.

 

“You awake?” he says. It's the kind of talk he hates, but he doesn't have anything else to say.

 

“I don't sleep,” says Cas, flatly. His shoulderblades move eerily under his skin. Or not-his-skin. This isn't something Dean wants to think about.

 

“Right.”

 

They are lying too far apart. Not that Dean is used to the post-coital cuddling so many of his one-night stands have insisted on. Not that he doesn't want—fuck. His mind is such a haze, half-afterglow and half-discomfort. There's a gap in the motel curtains that just won't fucking close; it's letting the moon in.

 

Cas turns over. His eyes cut through the dark like blades.

 

Dean expects him to say something; he doesn't. Just stares, and Dean can't tell what he's staring at—his face, or past it, or into it.

 

He should ask what's wrong. Then again, maybe he should just turn over and go to sleep and hope for morning to snap in fast and hard and erase the next eight hours.

 

He wonders what this is going to make of them. How Sam will take the news (if they ever come together again—Dean's not sure about that at this point—knows they've planned to meet in the morning but isn't entirely sure that his brother will show—and what will he say about where he's been?  _To the future and back—oh, and I fucked Cas._ No. None of that. Strictly need-to-know.), if this will ever happen again, if they will come out of this room tomorrow hating each other, loving each other, knowing more about each other than can ever be forgotten. And what any of that means.

 

“I'm going to sleep,” he says, more as an instruction to himself than a warning to Cas.

 

Cas grips the pillow a little in his long, pretty fingers.

 

Dean shifts onto his back and closes his eyes. Cas' gaze bores into him like botfly maggots burrowing into his skin. He tries to ignore it.

* * *

 

He opens his eyes at midnight, ish, and realises he hasn't actually slept at all, only tried to fool his eyes into the patterns of REM and failed. Cas is stretched out on his back, now, his own eyes only half-open. Dean can't tell if he's breathing (has forgotten whether or not he's ever bothered to pretend to breathe).

 

There's something distinctly alien about Cas, now, that Dean's never had the time to ponder before. A transluscence to him, and a simultaneous opacity behind his eyes, no matter how hard Dean looks into them. The way he looked a few hours ago riding Dean as if he'd known how to do it all his hundreds of thousands of years of life—like a pistoning machine, and equally like something out of a fever dream, shifting and flickering as if uncontained by his skin. That's not him, really, lying here; it's hard to remember that. That's some poor fucker who opened up his body to that alien thing hoping for something good to happen.

 

Dean has no idea what it is he actually wants. That poor fucker's body or the thing inside it.

 

Cas doesn't seem to notice that he's awake. Maybe he's asleep in whatever weird way angels are in their bodies. Dean thinks of sleeping bags and feels a creeping down his spine.

* * *

 

He must drift off, because he's aware suddenly of someone looking at him, and is forced to blink his eyes open. Cas is back to staring, at or through him, sitting up, now, cross-legged, leaning between the headboard and the corner.

 

“This what you do all night?” Dean groans, stretching, trying to pop the sleep out of his bones. “Stare at people?”

 

Cas doesn't answer.

 

Dean looks up at the pebbled ceiling, wishing it were light enough to see the cracks and the texture. He doesn't know what time it is. Has a strange feeling that looking at the clock would tell him nothing.

 

“Had this dream about you once,” he says, suddenly unsure how long ago it was, if it happened, maybe, just now. “Back where Sam buried me, in Illinois. You were digging a hole with your bare hands.”

 

Cas uncrosses one leg and rests it flat on the bed in front of him. He's a shadow in the corner of Dean's eye.

 

“When you were finished—I was there on the ground next to you. You picked me up and put me in the hole. Opened my mouth and filled it with dirt.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You looked at me—me standing there, me watching. Your face was like this spotlight.”

 

“You remember.”

 

Dean looks at him, disturbed by the black hole of his head. The moon and its light have disappeared.

 

“Well,” Cas says, “I had to dig you up to make your body up again. And then I had to put you back.”

* * *

 

Dean sleeps fitfully, legs restless, too aware of the air on his bare skin. Flits in and out of snatches of dream, can't remember any of it when he surfaces. A ringing in his ear wakes him—pulls him up, rather, like a drowning swimmer breaching the water.

 

Cas lies there, unmoving, automotonlike. Dean watches him for a moment, trying to gauge any tiny movement of his eyelashes, any tics in his neck. (Not his neck, just a sleeve, just a glamour, just.)

 

A groan in the corner of the room. Could be mistaken for a door creaking if Dean didn't know himself so well.

 

He can't see it, but he knows instinctively what—who—it is. A black familiarity compressed into the corner, sucking in what little moonlight is left like a vacuum. Feathers rustling. Wet clicking that he recognises, sickly, as eyelids opening and closing.

 

“Cas,” he says, looking into it.

 

It groans again, and he feels a musicality to it. That shivering rustling. He looks back toward the body lying next to him, realises that it's empty, wonders if he's dreaming. It doesn't entirely matter.

 

“Cas,” he says, sliding his eyes back to the mass in the corner. It's trying so hard to be contained, to stoop below this ceiling. Now he sees them—wings. Six of them—he isn't sure how he knows their number, only that he feels it in his chest. Sharply folded in like shawls. He feels a jolt of panic or fear. Thinks about a woman with dark hair and embers for eyes and knows what he's looking at. His voice shakes, though he wishes it wouldn't. “Baby, put your skin back on.”

 

Those sharp angles snap back and there's a noise like a screech too high to hear, and it's as if someone's shunted on a spotlight, the brightest thing in the universe, right into Dean's face, six huge shadows flying up the walls, a hundred eyes screaming out at him.

 

He wakes up.

* * *

 

“I had a dream about you,” Cas tells him. They're sitting up together, headboard digging into their naked spines. “I think it was a dream. I wouldn't know what those are like.”

 

Why can't it be morning?

 

“There was a face beneath your face. Something dark that I didn't know. I thought,  _I didn't make you like that._ I looked as hard as I could but it wouldn't go away.”

 

Dean doesn't say anything. He looks past his feet to the end of the bed and past that, to their clothes on the floor, the base of the wall, the mildew festering there.

 

“When I met you in Hell you were the scariest thing I had ever seen.”

 

It's not like him to say that kind of thing; Dean doesn't know how he feels about it.

 

“So what does that mean?” Dean kicks an edge of sheet off his foot. “I scare you?”

 

“Frankly. Yes,” says Cas.

 

“You scare me too.”

 

He doesn't have to look to know that trademark head-cock is happening. “Why?”

 

Dean scoffs. “ _Why_ ? Look at you.” He regrets the all-over gesture he makes with his hand but Cas doesn't seem perturbed. “You're—you're not even real. That isn't what you look like. I don't even know what you are.”

 

“I could say the same for you,” Cas says.

 

“You don't know what I am?”

 

“Well,” says Cas, “neither of us are wearing what we are.”

 

He's right. He's a six-winged monster crammed into the skeleton of some poor sap who didn't know any better. (If he'd seen what Dean has seen would he have been so eager?) And Dean, well, Dean's still coal smoke, somewhere deep down, he knows it, knows Cas knows it.

 

“That so bad?”

 

“No,” Cas says. “We'd be a lot scarier if we looked like ourselves.”

 

Together they look towards the end of the bed, to the mildew on the wall.

 

Dean says, “You think we were made for each other?”

 

“No,” says Cas.

 

“So this was a mistake. All of this.”

 

“No,” says Cas. “I don't believe in mistakes.”

 

Maybe someday it'll be morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
